Gail Desler

Find out more about Gooru http://goorulearning.org on this episode of TTT. This is the first in a series of webcasts in which we'll focus on Gooru, asking: How do you teach with Gooru? We'll be talking with teachers who use Gooru in their classrooms, asking them to share best practices and exchange ideas. And we'll dialogue with the Gooru team around what might be done to improve Gooru for all of us?

If you're new to Gooru, here are three places to start your inquiries:

Gooru Learning itself has a pedigree that is worth considering. Gooru is developed by Ednovo, the nonprofit education startup founded by Prasad Ram. Ram has a rich history in Silicon Valley, including work at Xerox PARC, Yahoo! and Google. While Director of Engineering for Google Research, Ram developed the concept for using search technology to discover educational content. Ram decided to leave Google in January 2011 and pursue this concept. Ram has started an education focused non-profit startup called Ednovo, which is going to build upon Gooru, a free web based education solution that was begun as a ’20% effort’ at Google, and piloted in India with 25 classrooms and 1000 students. Gooru allows teachers to use openly licensed web resources, find lesson plans on all subjects and topics and then customize it to their specific needs, with rich multimedia content including videos, slides, and simulations.

So, this morning, I went to Gooru to poke around a bit and remember what it is about. When I had been there last, the site had recently launched and I wasn’t quite sure what they were up to. There didn’t seem to be a lot of content. Now I understand. The site is another way to help students streamline their research queries (sort of like Instagrok, which I use) and for teachers to build up “collections” of resources that can be shared. I like the overall feel of the site — it takes a few minutes to get a sense of what to do, but once you understand it, you will see there are powerful paths to follow.

Every day teachers and students scour the web to find the best resources to help them learn or teach, pulling from different resources scattered all over the Internet--but what if you could find and organize all the best web resources in one place? With Gooru, you can. Watch NASA videos about solar flares, play interactive games on PBS.com that teach about friction, and take quizzes on equations from Khan Academy. We aggregate the best of the web, giving you high-quality and free multimedia resources within seconds, so you can spend more time studying, and less time searching. When you find resources you love, you can then organize them into a playlist called a collection.

You might also find out what you need to know to get started by listening to our inspiring guests for this episode of TTT:

Paul Allison, Monika Hardy, and Chris Sloan

host Xenia Shih, Timothy Burke, and Jody Donovan from Gooru

along with two amazing California teachers, Leah Jensen and Gail Desler.

Enjoy!

Click Read more to see the chat that was happening during this live webcast and some important links to resources.

We are joined by colleagues from England and Australia on this episode of TTT as we follow-up with them on an earler conversations about blogging in elementary schools: http://edtechtalk.com/node/5156.

Our goal is simple: we want to make plans for elementary school students to find and respond to each others blog posts this spring. Joining us on this episode of TTT are Makewaves’ Cliff Manning, KidBlog’s Matt Hardy, Sue Waters from EduBlogs, and some of us are from Youth Voices. We are also joined by David Mitchell, the Quadblogging guru and Linda Yollis an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles who Quadblogs her own way.

The idea is deceptively simple. Four teachers agree to have their students comment on each other's blogs in an organized fashion. Each week, one of the four gets a turn as the spotlight class. The other three classes visit and leave comments. Over the course of a month, every student's work gets read and commented upon. Along the way, students learn about respectful online communication. They may decide to revise their thinking if a commenter shares a perspective they haven't considered.

QuadBlogging is a leg up to an audience for your class/school blog. Over the last 12 months 100,000 pupils have been involved in QuadBlogging from 3000 classes in 40 countries....

A Blog needs an audience to keep it alive for your learners. Too often blogs wither away leaving the learners frustrated and bored. Quadblogging gives your blog a truly authentic and global audience that will visit your blog, leave comments and return on a cycle. Here’s how it works:

You sign up using the form below, shortly after, you will be allocated a Quad four schools/classes including your own. Each Quad has a co-ordinator who is responsible for making sure each of the quad members know what is going on and when. Each week one blog is the focus blog with the other three blogs visiting and commenting during that week. In week two, another school/class blog is the focus with the other three visiting and commenting. This is repeated until each of the classes/schools has had their week in the spotlight. The cycle is then repeated. However, this time, your pupils know what is coming – They will work harder than you have seen them work in order to get content on their blog!

QuadBlogging has been mentioned very highly in recent OfSTED Reports here in the UK and praised for offering opportunities for:“profound impact in developing pupils’ team working, communication and problem-solving skills.”

So you want your K-6 students to blog because you want them to have an audience beyond your classroom. What do you do? Do you set up a blog for each student or for your class, perhaps using http://edublogs.org? Do you join us at http://youthvoices.net or do you join http://kidblog.org ? And there are plenty of other choices.

But here's the rub: How do you get your students' posts out there in the world to get responses from K-6 students like them? How can be build a stronger community of elementary school teachers whose students are blogging together?

We would like to invite you to help us consider some of these questions with the amazing educators on this episode of TTT.

Consider QuadBlogging and other complications around having your own class EduBlog or working in a community like Youth Voices or KidBlog, and the problems and delights of having different ages working together, or not?

Gail Desler and Kevin Hodgson started this conversation in November at NCTE and they would like to see if it might not be possible to get something started with NWP elementary school teachers around some sort of community that gets more and more comments flowing.

Here's Gail's recent email that led us to schedule a TTT around this topic:

I would love to head into the New Year with some shared discussions on creating an elementary community of digital kids/digital writers that would lead into YouthVoices, but would actually be its own community. As I mentioned to both of you at NCTE, I'm spurred on by Suzie Boss's (who will be joining us on TTT) recent Edutopia post: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/quad-blogging-technology-classroom-suzie-boss Just seems like a perfect NWP project - that would be pretty easy to initiate and maintain.

That's not all! On Wednesday, January 9, 2013, we plan a follow-up conversation with many of the same people on this episode. Join us at http://edtechtalk.com/ttt on Wednesday, 1.9.13 at 5PM ET/2PM PT/World Times: http://goo.gl/024pD

Saturday, October 13: Join the Classroom 2.0 LIVE Community for a webinar preview of the 2012 K-12 Online Conference. Organizers will discuss what’s new in this year’s conference, “Learn, Share and Remix.” Get a taste of the presentations coming in our strands this year, Getting Started, Visioning New Curriculum, Kicking It Up a Notch and Student Voices. Also learn about our dynamic pre-conference keynote presentation, to be shared by Kevin Honeycutt. The homepage of Classroom 2.0 LIVE (http://live.classroom20.com) will have the direct Blackboard Collaborate links the week prior to this show.

The 2012 K-12 Online Conference is coming to a computer near you soon! This year’s FREE online conference will take place the weeks of Oct 22 – 25 and Oct 29 – Nov. 2, with a pre-conference keynote by Kevin Honeycutt on October 15th. The 2012 theme is, “Learn, Share, Remix.”

The organizer team for this year’s conference selected “Learn, Share, Remix” for our theme because it embodies many of the ACTIONS we can model as 21st century teachers and students. We all want to model lifelong learning. Our digital connections afford us amazing opportunities to SHARE what we are learning along the way. REMIXING is the process taking knowledge and using it in creative and innovative ways. Remixers build on the work of others. REMIXING can also include transforming the ways we teach and learn. In each strand of our conference this year, we hope presenters will explore and model ways we can learn, share and remix our professional development.

As we have in the past six years since K12Online started in 2006, our conference will continue to be primarily asynchronous, offering downloadable videos for participants to view at any time. We will also host several live events during this year’s conference. All conference dates will be listed on our 2012 Schedule. http://k12onlineconference.org/?page_id=1046

Gail Desler and Natalie Bernasconi will keynote our “Getting Started” strand, one of two strands to be shared the first full week of our conference October 22 – 25.

Karen Fasimpaur will keynote our second strand for week one of our 2012 conference, “Visioning New Curriculum.” This is a new and exciting strand for K-12 Online this year.

Mathew Needleman will keynote the “Kicking It Up a Notch” strand of our 2012 conference in week two, which will run Oct 29 – Nov 2.

Add your comments to this post. Let us know what you think about Tommy’s connected pedagogy, and help us look into the future of Youth Voices. http://youthvoices.net. This episode might be a good moment for us to connect to old friends who want to work with us at Youth Voices again or meet new people as well.

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